General Literary

After her mother's death, Clara returns to the dying fishing village of Thornhaven and uncovers a family secret buried with the woman she never fully knew — a secret that forces her to decide whether the sea gave everything and took everything, or whether some things are too heavy to carry alone.

A family keeps one long oak table for four generations, and every marriage, exile, and loss is seated and unseated around it — a domestic saga in which the table, not the house, holds the memory of the family.

In a Scottish fishing village where the lighthouse has gone dark, a widowed keeper and a young journalist from London close the last winter of a four-year silence between them, their mother between the two of them.

Three Saltwyke women, three summers, one tide-side house and one family ledger of everyone who walked the Nine Steps and never came back. Cerys refuses to hand it over in 1953, Hesper burns her own half of it in 1987, and in 2019 Ismay finds the missing year pasted back in her mother's hand.